Under Heaven (13 page)

The only other time he'd been in command of cavalry had been north of the Wall, on campaign among the nomads. He'd led fifty soldiers, not just five riders, as now.
Command of a
dui
had been more than he deserved, but Tai had been young enough to feel that his father's fame and rank had simply opened a doorway for him to show what he could do, what he honestly merited. He'd welcomed the chance to prove himself.
He didn't want to dwell on it now, all these years after, but being among soldiers again, riding in open country towards a changed life seemed to make it inevitable that his thoughts would drift.
That time among the Bogu had begun the changes in his life. Before that, he'd thought he knew what his course would be. After, he was shaken, unsure. Adrift for a long time.
He'd told what had happened, how it had ended, as best he could. First to his superior officers, and then to his father when they were both home. (Not his brothers: one was too young, the other not a confidant.)
He'd been permitted to honourably resign rank and post, leave the army. It was unusual. Going to Stone Drum Mountain some time later had been a useful, perhaps even an appropriate next stage, though he doubted the Kanlin masters on the mountain saw it that way, since he'd left them, too.
But after what had happened on the northern steppes that autumn, it had not been considered unexpected that a young man would want to spend time searching for spiritual guidance, discipline, austerity.
Tai remembered being surprised that his military superiors had believed his northern tale, and even more at the hint of understanding among them. Understanding was not seen as a strength, let alone a virtue, in the higher ranks of the Kitan army.
Only later did he realize that he and his men might not have been the first or the only ones to encounter some terrifying strangeness among the Bogu. He'd wondered over the years about other stories; no one ever told him names, or what had happened.
He was not blamed for what had happened.
That had also surprised him. It still did. Military rank carried responsibilities, consequences. But it seemed the official view was that some encounters between civilized men and savagery in barbarian lands were not to be anticipated or controlled by any officer. Ordinary soldiers' conduct could break down in such places.
The Kitan felt a defining superiority and contempt for those beyond their borders, but also fear whenever they left home, even if that was denied. It made for a dangerous intermingling.
For a long time their armies had been going among the nomads to ensure the succession of the chieftain--the kaghan--they favoured. Once you went north of the Wall and its watchtowers you were living in the open or in isolated garrison forts among the Bogu or the Shuoki, fighting beside or against the barely human. It was unreasonable to expect men to conduct themselves as if they were doing domestic duty on the Great Canal or among summer rice fields, guarding peasants against bandits or tigers.
Manipulating the Bogu succession was important. The Ta-Ming Palace had a considerable interest in who ruled the nomads and how willing they were to offer docility along the border and their thick-maned horses in exchange for empty, honorary titles, lengths of lesser silk, and the promise of support against the next usurper.
Unless, of course, the next usurper made more attractive overtures.
The nomads' grazing lands, fractured among rival tribes, stretched from the Wall all the way to the bone-cold north among birch and pine forests, beyond which the sun was said to disappear all winter and never go down in summer.
Those farthest ice-lands didn't matter, except as a source of fur and amber. What mattered was that on their nearer margins the nomads' lands bordered Kitai itself--and ran alongside the Silk Roads--all the way from the deserts to the eastern sea. The Long Wall kept the nomads out, most of the time.
But the northern fork of the great trade routes curved up through the steppes, and so the lucrative flow of luxuries into the glorious Kitan empire depended to a great degree on camel-trains being safe from harassment.
The Taguran empire in the west was another threat, of course, and required different solutions, but for some time the Tagurans had been quiet, trading for themselves with those taking the southern branch of the route, exacting tolls and duties in far-off fortresses they controlled. Acquiring Sardian horses.
Xinan wasn't happy about this, but could live with it, or so it had been decided. Tagur and its king had been bought off from worse with, among other things, a slender Kitan princess, in the aftermath of wars that had drained both empires.
Peace on his various borders might reduce an emperor's chances of glory, but Emperor Taizu had reigned for a long time and had won battles enough. Wealth and comfort, the building of his own magnificent tomb-to-be north of Xinan (colossal beyond words, overshadowing his father's), languid days and nights with his Precious Consort and the music she made ... for an aging emperor these appeared to be adequate compensation.
Let Wen Jian's sleek, clever cousin Zhou be first minister if he wished (and if
she
wished it). Let him be the one to sort through, after a forty-year reign, the complexities of court and army and barbarians. One could grow weary of these.
The emperor had a woman for the ages making music for him, dancing for him. He had rituals to follow and carefully measured powders to consume--with her--in pursuit of longed-for immortality. He might never even need his tomb if the three stars of the Hunter's Belt, the asterism of this Ninth Dynasty, could be aligned by alchemists with the emperor's merit and his desire.
As for ambitious younger men in the empire? Well, there
had
been steady fighting among the Bogu against their eastern rivals, the Shuoki, and in their own internal tribal wars, and these continued.
Military officers and youthful aristocrats (and brave men of no particular birth) had always been able to assuage a hunger for blood and sword-glory somewhere. For this time it was in the north, where the emptiness of the grasslands could dwarf a man, or change his soul.
For Shen Tai, second son of General Shen Gao, that last had been what had happened, years ago, during an autumn among the nomads.
IT WAS EXPLAINED to them that evil spirits, sent by tribal enemies, had afflicted the soul of Meshag, the son of Hurok.
Hurok had been the Ta-Ming's chosen kaghan, the man they were in the steppe lands to support.
His eldest son, a man in the prime of health, had fallen suddenly, gravely ill--unresponsive, barely breathing--in the midst of a campaign. It was determined that shamans of the enemy had invoked dark spirits against him: so the nomads told the Kitan soldiers among them.
The imperial officers did not know how that understanding had been arrived at, or why the alleged magic was directed at the son and not the father (though some of them had views, by then, as to which was the better man). This business of Bogu magic--shamans, animal totems, spirit journeys from the body--was simply too alien, too barbaric, for words.
It was only reported to them as a courtesy, along with what apparently was going to be done in a desperate effort to make the sick man well. This last information had compelled some hard thinking among the army leaders sent north from Kitai.
Hurok was important and, therefore, so was his son. The father had sent private earnests of allegiance and offerings to the Long Wall in the spring--good horses and wolf pelts and two young women--his own daughters, apparently--to join the emperor's ten thousand concubines in their palace wing.
Hurok, it emerged, was willing to contemplate a revolt against the ruling kaghan, his brother-in-law, Dulan.
Dulan had not sent as many horses or furs.
Instead, his envoys had brought weak, small-boned horses, some with colic, to the wide northern loop of the Golden River where the exchange was done each spring.
The kaghan's emissaries had shrugged and grimaced, spat and gestured, when the Kitan pointed out these deficiencies. They claimed the grasses had been poor that year, too many gazelles and rabbits, sickness among the herds.
Their own mounts had looked sturdy and healthy.
It seemed to the senior mandarins charged with evaluating such information for the celestial emperor that Dulan Kaghan might have grown a little too secure, perhaps even resentful of his annual commitment to far-off Xinan.
It had been decided that a reminder of the power of Kitai was past due. Patience had been abused. The emperor had, once again, been too generous, too indulgent of lesser peoples and their insolence.
Hurok had been quietly invited to contemplate a more lofty future. He had done so, happily.
Fifteen thousand Kitan soldiers had gone north late that summer beyond the loop of the river, beyond the Wall.
Dulan Kaghan, with his own forces and followers, had been in strategic retreat ever since, maddeningly hard to pin down in the vast grasslands, waiting for allies from north and west, and for winter.
There were no cities to pillage and burn on the steppe, no enemy fortresses to besiege and starve into submission, no crops to ravage or seize, and they were acting for the man who needed to claim the trust of the nomads afterwards. It was a different sort of warfare.
The key was, clearly, to find and engage Dulan's forces. Or just kill the man, one way or another. Hurok, however, in the growing opinion of the Kitan expeditionary army's officers, was emerging as a feeble figure: a weak piece of pottery containing nothing but ambition.
He drank
kumiss
from first light, was drunk most of the day, sloppily hunting wolves, or lolling in his yurt. There was nothing wrong with a man drinking, but not on campaign. His eldest son, Meshag, was a better-fired vessel, so they reported back.
In the event, Meshag, in turn privately approached, did not appear to have any great aversion to the suggestion that he might aspire to more than merely being the strongest son of a propped-up kaghan.
They were not an especially subtle people, these nomads of the steppe, and the empire of the Kitan, amongst everything else, had had close to a thousand years and nine dynasties to perfect the arts of political manipulation.
There were books about this, any competent civil servant had them memorized. They were a part of the examinations.
"Consider and evaluate the competing doctrines emerging from Third Dynasty writings as to the proper conduct of succession issues among tribute-bearing states. It is expected that you will cite passages from the texts. Apply your preferred doctrine to resolving current issues pertaining to the southwest and the peoples along the margins of the Pearl Sea. Conclude with a six-line regulated-verse poem summarizing your proposals. Include a reference to the five sacred birds in this poem."
Of course, the appraisal of this work also included judging the quality of the candidate's calligraphy. Formal hand, not running hand.
With whom did these ignorant, fat-smeared barbarians, bare-chested as often as not, hair greasy and to their waists, smelling of sour, fermented milk, sheep dung, and their horses, think they were dealing?
But before this newer plan for the Bogu succession could be implemented, young Meshag had fallen ill, precisely at sundown, in his camp one windy autumn day.
He had been standing by an open fire, a cup of
kumiss
in one hand, laughing at a jest, a graceful man--then his cup had fallen into trampled grass, his knees had buckled, and he'd toppled to one side, barely missing the fire.
His eyes had closed and had not opened again.
His women and followers, extravagantly distressed, made it clear that this had to have been done by sinister powers--there were unmistakable signs. Their own shaman, small and quavering, said as much but admitted, in the morning, after a night spent chanting and drumming at Meshag's side, that he was unequal to shaping a response capable of driving malign spirits from the unconscious man.
Only someone he named as the white shaman of the lake could overmaster the darkness sent to claim Meshag's soul and bear it away.
This lake was, it appeared, many weeks' journey north. They would set out the next morning, the Bogu said, bearing Meshag in a covered litter. They did not know if they could keep his soul near his body for so long but there was no alternative course. The little shaman would travel with them, do all he could.
Whatever the Kitan expeditionary force thought about this, there wasn't much they could do. Two army physicians, summoned to take the man's pulses and measure auras, were at a loss. He breathed, his heart beat, he never opened his eyes. When the eyelids were lifted, the eyes were black, disturbingly so.
Meshag was, for good or ill, a component of imperial strategy now. If he died, adjustments would have to be made. Again. It was decided that a number of their own cavalry would go north with his party, to maintain a Kitan presence and report back immediately if the man died.
His death was what they expected. Advance word would go to Xinan immediately. The assigned cavalry officer riding north with the Bogu was to exercise his best judgment in all matters that arose. He and his men would be desperately far away, cut off from all others.
Shen Tai, son of Shen Gao, was selected to lead this contingent.
If that decision carried an element of unspoken punishment for the young man having a rank he hadn't earned, no one could possibly be faulted later for giving him the assignment.
It was an honour, wasn't it? To be sent into danger? What else could a young officer want? This was a chance to claim glory. Why else were they here? You didn't join the army to pursue a meditative life. Go be a hermit of the Path, eat acorns and berries in a cave on some mountainside, if that was what you wanted.
THEY WORSHIPPED the Horse God and the Lord of the Sky.
The Son of the Sky was the God of Death. His mother dwelled in the Bottomless Lake, far to the north. It froze in winter.
No, this was not the lake of their journey now, it was much farther north, guarded by demons.
In the afterworld, everything was reversed. Rivers ran from the sea, the sun rose west, winter was green. The dead were laid to rest on open grass, unburied, to be consumed by wolves and so returned to the Sky. Dishes and pottery were laid upside down or shattered by the body, food was spilled, weapons broken--so the dead could recognize and lay claim to these things in the backwards world.